You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do
by AlyCat143
Summary: Ever wonder how Nico's first trials of shadow travel went? How he got his aviator jacket? Here's a small one-shot of what I think it would look like. Includes OC's, Nico friendship.


…**.**

The first time Nico met the _Spartoi_ was a about a month after he had run away from camp. It was his third try in shadow traveling, after accidently ending up in China, and then somewhere in Illinois. It was discouraging to find himself face-first in a pile of snow as it was dumping freezing cold buckets of snow down on him.

He would have helped himself out of the chilling cold, if it weren't for the fact that he was so utterly exhausted from shadow traveling to wherever he was. But he was tired, and he couldn't even find the strength to move his arms, let alone actually get up from the snow. He was definitely sure that he was going to die this time, he decided as a violent shiver racked through his body. There was no way around it.

_Maybe I'll be with Bianca…_ As soon as the thought of his sister flashed into his mind, Nico squeezed his eyes shut and forced her out of his mind. He couldn't think of her, not yet at least.

Nico didn't know how long he had lay there in the numbing weather. Surely he was pretty close to being buried alive by then. The sound that was once the cold snow blowing around had dulled as his ears slowly started to freeze, and now it was just a soft whir.

"When do we get to rest? I'm tired!"

It was muffled, but he could definitely hear it. Someone was close. It wrenched Nico's heart to know that he was going to die when there was help so close. Yet he couldn't do anything about it. He felt so useless, so helpless.

"Hey, Kylie? What's that over there?" A different voice.

Nico wasn't sure if his ears were deceiving him, but it almost sounded as if the voices were getting closer.

"Oh my gods," another voice gasped out as what Nico thought were footsteps became slightly heavier and louder. There was more than just one set of footsteps, Nico was sure of that much. "Teo, help me here! Grier, go get the twins and tell them to prepare our camp! Bring back something we can use to transport him over!"

He wasn't entirely sure of it, but it felt as if the snowfall had lessened once whoever it was arrived. As the voice continued to command orders, Nico could feel, despite the numbness in his limbs, the snow covering him being scooped off of him quickly.

"Help me roll him over," the voice commanded. "So we can move him onto my lap."

Nico tried his best to open his eyes to see his saviors, but he realized with a start that his eyelids were as good as frozen shut.

"Is he alive?" asked the younger voice, whom Nico, in his half-conscious state, assumed to be Teo.

There was a small amount of shuffling before he felt warm hands pressed against his throat. Whoever it was, was searching for his pulse. After a couple seconds, the warmth left his throat, and Nico felt his body yearn to feel that heat against his freezing skin once more.

Then, he felt that same warmth over his eyelids.

"What are you doing, Kylie?"

"His eyes look to be frosted shut. I'm heating them up so he can open them," the voice, Kylie, informed Teo. "I think he's conscious right now, and if I can help him to open his eyes, then I know that we can probably save him."

There was a little more shuffling, before Teo spoke up again. "Here, let me. My hands are a lot warmer than yours."

Kylie's hands were removed from Nico's face, and they were quickly replaced by ones that were, sure to Teo's word, a lot warmer. The skin around Nico's eyes started to feel tingly. Before he could stop it, a small moan escaped from the son of Hades' lips at the feeling of the warmth.

Teo's hands were taken away, and Nico immediately seized the opportunity to try and open his eyes once more. At first, all he saw was white blurred together with darker colors, but once his vision cleared up, he realized he was staring up at a girl that looked around Bi –no, eleven or twelve years old. He wouldn't think about her. He couldn't.

Another thing he noticed was that the wind and snow had, in fact, lessened, but it seemed to only be around their area. The young Italian boy sluggishly looked back up to his savior to try and ask why that was, but he quickly found his mind slipping consciousness.

Before Nico knew it, everything had gone black.

…**.**

Nico felt…tingly. All over his body, he felt a tingling sensation. Was this what it felt like to be dead? Was he going to go through judgment soon? To see his father soon?

When Nico opened his eyes, he was relieved to find that he wasn't, in fact, in the Underworld. No, Nico actually had to shut his eyes to avoid the blinding white all around him.

Where was he now?

"Grier! Grier! He's awake!" a voice, that Nico recognized it to belong to Teo, called out. There was a little shuffling, and Nico willed his eyes to open once again. When he did, he was staring into the face of a grey-eyed girl, whose dirty blonde hair had been tied back in a French plait.

"You feeling okay, kid?" the girl asked while stretching her hand forward to feel the temperature of Nico's body, although the young boy recoiled with a glare.

"I'm not a kid." He meant it to come out as a hiss, but instead it came out as a weak croak. The girl sneered before she glanced away from Nico and motioned something. She reached out after a couple seconds, and then held a cup of water in front of his face. She moved to help him drink it, but Nico recoiled again. "I don't need your help." This time he did hiss his words out as he reached for the cup himself. Just as his tingly, numb fingers wrapped around it, he ripped it away from the girl's hand.

The girl kept the smirk on her face as she snorted. "Right, because you totally didn't need help as you were slowly freezing to death a five hours ago. You're lucky Kylie, Teo and I found you."

Nico sneered as he let the cool water sooth his dry throat.

She simply rolled her eyes and occupied herself while Nico insisted upon pushing himself to keep his pride in tact. "Teo, can you go check to see if Kylie and the other two are back? They've been gone for a while and I'm worried that they've been attacked by monsters."

_Monsters? _Nico thought. _These people are demigods too?_

"There's no need, Grier," Teo, a brunette boy with blue eyes that looked to be around Nico's age, shrugged in reply. He pointed towards what Nico assumed was the exit. "They're right there."

Sure enough, there was the three that Teo and Grier were talking about. The one in the lead was a girl with black curly hair that hung a couple centimeters past her shoulders, pale green eyes, and skin just about, if not paler, than his. Nico recognized her to be the one that had helped save him, Kylie.

The other two looked identical, making Nico assume that they were twins. They both had shaggy bronze hair and brown eyes, and stood nearly two full heads taller than Kylie. All three of them looked slightly battered.

"Sorry we're late –" one of the twins said.

"-But we ran into a couple Hellhounds on our way back," the other completed.

"Not to mention the fact that the hippies didn't have anything suitable at the thrift shops," Kylie added as she kneeled down on the ground once she reached Grier, Nico, and Teo.

"Ah, the good city of Nelson, eh?" the twins chorused sarcastically.

_Where am I? _Nico asked himself as he watched Kylie rummage through the light blue backpack that had been slung over her shoulder.

She seemed to notice Nico watching her intently, because she looked up and smiled. "Glad to see you're awake. You gave us all a good scare, _priyatel'_."

"I –" Nico started, quick to try and defend himself, but fell short. "Uh…what?"

She blinked. "Oh, did I say something in Russian again? Sorry." She paused for a moment. "And it wasn't an insult or anything! It means pal, like a friend."

"Better than kid," Nico muttered, shooting a pointed glare at Grier, who scoffed.

"Well you're not a kid," Kylie agreed, and Nico once again felt confused. "You're a warrior, like all of us." For emphasis, Kylie took her hands away from her bag and motioned to the four other demigods.

…**.**

Nico's first question was his location. It turned out that he had shadow traveled from Illinois all the way into British Columbia, Canada, a little ways away from a small town called Nelson near the Canada-USA border, in a snow cave. That alone had taken a little time to process, but it didn't stop the questions.

"Who are you?" was his next.

Kylie smiled up at him before poking the fire they were all circled around with a stray stick. "My name's Kylie Melnikoff, and I just turned twelve in December." She paused to poke at the fire again. "The two twins over there are Patrick and Ross, our food suppliers, and they're both fifteen." Another pause as she handed Nico a different stick, one with a pointed end that looked to be carved with a knife. "Teo's ten, and he's our healer." She handed him the package of hotdogs so he could skewer one. "And finally, there's Grier, our strategist, who is fourteen years old. Together, we're _Spartoi_; a group of outcast demigods who travel around Canada to find stray demigods and help them on their way to safety."

Nico was silent as he shakily held his skewer near the fire, still not quite recovered from the cold, before he spoke up. "I'm Nico di Angelo." He squeezed his eyes shut, debating on whether to tell the group of demigods who his parentage was –but then he decided against it. They didn't mention their parents, so why should he?

Besides, he wasn't quite sure what to expect. Them to throw him out of their cave and let him freeze to death once more? Scorn him? No, Nico wouldn't take a chance to console these people he just met with something like that.

"Cool. So how'd you get stuck out here?" said Patrick…or Ross. Nico still wasn't quite sure who was who.

Nico's barriers were once again brought up. He trained his eyes on his hotdog. "Just trying to get used to my powers," he said cryptically, and resisted the urge to glare at whomever it was that he could feel staring at him.

"I know how you feel," Teo piped in. "Well, not really, but it was funny to watch the twins try and get used to their powers."

Grier only nodded as she rotated her hotdog, before sending him a smirk that looked to have a sinister flash, if only for a second. "Must have been a pretty big screw up to end up nearly frozen."

Nico ignored that comment and rotated his hotdog too, trying to soak up the heat the fire gave off. He really needed to get something other than a T-shirt to wear on his arms. "So why aren't you guys at camp, then?"

There was an arrangement of replies.

Ross and Patrick simply shrugged, and said that it didn't quite go over well with them –whatever that meant. Grier had said that it was too far and too expensive to go all the way to New York although from the look in her eyes, Nico thought it was something else, while Teo had never been to camp before. Kylie had found him and he decided to stay with them.

Nico looked at Kylie, waiting for her answer. There was a small frown on her face as she reached into one of the twins' bag to bring out a plastic bag of hotdog buns. "I had only spent one summer there. I didn't really like it, because even though I had been claimed, I was still stuck in the Hermes cabin. There was no respect for my mother, or any of the minor gods –not even Hades, one of the Big Three. Being at the camps –camp-" she quickly corrected herself. "Just didn't sit well with me, so I came back up here. I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?"

_You gotta do what you gotta do._

"But aren't you worried at all that you don't have proper training?" Nico questioned as he received a bun.

"Not particularly," Grier replied. "While there are five of us, and that attracts monsters, there's just that many more people to back us up. Plus we get experience while fighting. It's just as good as that camp, if a little more dangerous."

"All in all, we're just a bunch of outcasts," the other twin shrugged.

…**.**

"You know you can stay with us, right?" Kylie asked, a worried frown tugging on her face. "You don't have to go off on your own."

Nico refused to meet her, or any of the other _Spartoi_ members' eyes. "I have to go. There's something I need to do." He squeezed his eyes shut as a memory of his sister flashed in his mind, and tried to suppress the anger that was trying to surge through his body. "I need to go and find –"

"Alright, we get it. You have this all-important mission you need to go on," Grier rolled her eyes, but gave the younger boy a teasing smile anyways. "Take care, okay kid? Don't let us find you almost dead again, yeah?"

"If you need any help, you know where to find us," the twins supplied. "We'll be somewhere in Canada."

"Maybe then I can teach you archery," Teo offered with his brightest smile. "And we can hang out, eh?"

Nico forced himself to look up and meet the eyes of the people that saved him. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "For everything. I guess…I guess I might see you later."

And with that, Nico turned on his heel and made move to walk away.

"Hey, aren't you forgetting something?"

Confused, Nico turned around, only to have something thrown into his face.

He fumbled with catching it in his hands once it slid off his face, and he stared at it confused. In his hands was an old aviator's jacket –one that was pretty large at that.

"Maybe with that you won't be so prone to freezing," Kylie told him with a smile. "And you better wear it, because it took a long time to find in those damn thrift shops, and we got attacked by hounds to get it."

A slight look of awe appeared on the young boy's face as he quickly slipped it on, already feeling the warmth emitting from it, already feeling the cold wind bouncing off of the oversized jacket harmlessly.

"You better come visit us sometime, yeah? If you need help, you can just contact us," Kylie continued. "And please take care of yourself, _priyatel'_."

Nico gave them one last nodded before shoving his hands in his pockets, and running into the shadow of a tree.

_You gotta do what you gotta do._

…**.**

**There you have it. Just a small one-shot that includes OC's that Nico will probably forget and abandon throughout his inner turmoil as he grows up (my poor baby).**

**Sorry it's not my best, but please review.**


End file.
